Nashville 2015

What’s the fastest growing segment of the tech industry right now? Did you answer mobile? You should have.

We are convinced that the best conferences provide ample opportunity for informal talks among both speakers and attendees. As a result, we opt to keep our events friendly, the topics focused and uninhibited by competing tracks. We choose to keep attendance at workable, pre-determined levels to enhance social networking opportunities. After all, we believe the impromptu conversations among colleagues are sometimes the ones that inform and inspire the most.

The Speakers

The Venue

The Iron Yard Nashville

613 Ewing Ave. NashvilleNashville,
TN37203

Nashville is a classic Southern city with a rich heritage in music. As robust as the city’s past is, entrepreneurs and tech companies are working to help build the future and make one of Tennessee’s largest cities one of Southeast’s best places to grow a software company.

Workshops

Frontend projects are becoming more and more complex, pushing greater rules and requirements into the browser. We expect a lot from modern web applications (many run entirely in the browser), but we’re rarely writing tests to verify that our high expectations are met. In this 1/2 day workshop we’ll give you the tools and techniques […]

The SMACSS Workshop is a full day of instruction and exercises on writing HTML and CSS using a flexible and modular approach that will improve team efficiency and minimize problems with growing projects. It takes the e-book and brings it to life with practical examples and in-depth discussion. Get the full background info on this […]

Responsive web design has taken our industry by storm and with good reason: it helps us improve our reach with less effort. But incorporating responsive design is not the goal, meeting our user’s needs is. Responsive design is not an end in itself… it’s just the beginning. We need to embrace the heterogenous nature of the […]

Schedule

June 8

Designers Can Open Source

This session will cover a few topics in relation to open source design, including:
* Open source licenses
* Benefits of open sourcing design work
* How to open source work
* How to contribute design to open source projects
* How to make friends with other designers
This topic is aimed at designers and some development practices will be discussed.

11:00 AM

Taking the Web Offline

Lets face it. There are more devices out there than you can support with dedicated native apps. And except for very specific cases, most of what you'll want to do with your app is available through web API's. And yes, this includes offline support. Whether it's a loss of cellular connectivity or lousy wifi at a conference, there will be times when a site can and should be available when the network is not. During this presentation we'll take a look at your options for storing data in the client browser and how you can leverage them.

12:00 PM

Lunch

1:00 PM

Micro-Interactions Matter

Designers understand that details matter. We adjust curves and nudge pixels in the tiny spaces no one else notices because we know that’s what makes a design great. Sometimes, though, we focus so much on the visual side of design that we overlook the interactive details and deliver interfaces with minor usability and accessibility issues that erode user confidence. Whether it's a fancy form design that isn't keyboard accessible or the voice dialing in your car, these interactions can frustrate users and drive them to seek out other options.
When a new, original microinteraction is done right, though, it feels inevitable. Think of the iPhone's slide to unlock and how it pretty much eliminated butt-dialing without creating a new hurdle for "opening" the phone. Consider Sparrow's pull-down to refresh. These seem obvious in retrospect, but we know it took dozens or even hundreds of iterations to make it feel just right.
In this session, we'll take a deep dive into how microinteractions can make interfaces more usable, recognizable and delightful. Learn to build trust (and your brand) as JD walks through his checklist for considering micro-interactions from initial perception through mouse, keyboard, touch and voice interactions. Then he’ll show you how to test your own designs to make sure you got it right.

02:00 PM

Falling in Love with Forms

Forms. Without them, the web would not be what it is today, but they are challenging from a markup and styling standpoint.
In this session, we will explore forms from top to bottom, examining how they work and how their components can be incorporated with other elements to maximize accessibility, improve semantics, and allow for more flexible styling. You’ll get to see the complete picture with forms, including

new HTML5 field types;

validation, error messages & formatting hints;

how to mark up and style forms for the greatest flexibility in responsive designs; and

best practices for enhancing forms with JavaScript.

03:00 PM

Native or not? The untapped power of web apps.

There are countless articles touting the superiority of native apps over web. “60fps", full access to hardware, “jank free”, and so on. While these points are certainly valid, I think the hype has skewed the public perception of the potential power of web-based apps. Sure, we can’t do access everything from the browser, but we can access a whole lot. We can design for a touchscreen, a motion sensor, geolocation, audio, and general mobility—instantly accessible across platforms without needing to make room on your phone for yet another app. Through a behind the scenes look at the Jambells.com experiment and other examples, we’ll remind ourselves of what’s possible in a web app, and take critical look at the pros (and cons) of non-native development.

04:00 PM

Rethinking The News: An Insider's Look at NPR's Responsive Redesign

From small to jumbo breakpoint, consultant Nick Whitmoyer shares his recent design work and insights with NPR’s responsive website. He’ll provide a look into combining news and audio, radio programs and content collections, along with experiences for desktops and touch devices.

June 9

10:00 AM

Letting Go of Workflow Baggage

Ben Callahan

Full talk description coming soon...

11:00 AM

A Programmer's Intuition: The Good, The Magical, and The Frustrating

Mason Stewart

With so much of the industry's thought bent on how we teach new programmers properly, there is less discussion on how we teach ourselves as experienced programmers. Over time, our experiences, abilities, feelings, and preferences all begin to converge in the form of intuition. As those who observe our magical-seeming intuition start asking, "How did she know how to do that?", we don't stop often enough to take stock of our own understanding.

Understanding exactly how we learn as programmers and being able to reverse-engineer our own intuition is critical to our ability to teach the next generation of hackers, teach ourselves, and accurately explain to our teams and customers why we feel the way we do.

12:00 PM

Lunch

01:00 PM

Style Guides: For Clients, for Products, and For Yourself

Sophie Shepherd

In the world of ever-changing design deliverables, a browser-based style guide serves as an anchor to the design system, and bridges the gap between design and front-end development. While a style guide is almost always a good idea, many factors determine what it should define and how it should be used in the lifecycle of the project. In her talk, Sophie will cover what a style guide should contain and how it can be used by a whole team (not only designers and developers!) — and how these things differ for client work, internal products, and open source products.

02:00 PM

Performance is everybody's job: from UX to design to development

Una Kravets

As builders of the web, performance is our most important job — it dictates a user’s practical experience, significantly impacting their overall happiness with a product. Beautiful does not always equal usable, yet when beautiful meets usable, it creates magic.
This talk outlines how performance is everybody's job: from UX to design to development, and will discuss how to optimize performance from each point in the build process. The audience will gain an understanding of the neuroscience behind page speed and will leave this talk with several tools, recommendations, and techniques to create performant products, increasing user adoption and making the internet a better place.

03:00 PM

Responsive Design for Web Applications

Jennifer Dellacroce

Nowadays, everyone is building responsive websites. But what are the unique challenges faced when designing complex user interactions that need to work beautifully on all screen sizes? During this presentation, we’ll discuss real life examples and our thought processes in tackling responsive design for our online form builder.

04:00 PM

Pull your front end out of your back end

Matt Kelly

We have entered the era of the front end. No longer a feature of back end frameworks, they now have powerful tools and their own development stacks. Using Foundation for Apps we'll show you how to build a responsive Angular web app and assemble all the Sass, JavaScript and view templates with a simple command line tool. For our next trick we'll show an example of how to wire your application up using Rails as your backend API.

Why is this so cool? It let's you rapidly prototype and build responsive web applications without having to setup (or even think) about a backend. Once it is integrated, your front end remains separate from the back end. Foundation for apps is the first front-end framework created for developing fully responsive web apps. It's built using Angular and works with any back end.

June 10

10:00 AM

Workshop

Beyond Responsive

Aaron Gustafson

Responsive web design has taken our industry by storm and with good reason: it helps us improve our reach with less effort. But incorporating responsive design is not the goal, meeting our user’s needs is. Responsive design is not an end in itself… it’s just the beginning.

We need to embrace the heterogenous nature of the web—myriad web-enabled devices with vastly different dimensions, screen sizes, networks, and capabilities in use by countless individuals, each with their own special needs—and craft experiences that will work anywhere at any time. We need to build robust systems that adapt in ways far beyond aesthetics.

Aaron Gustafson will open this workshop with a discussion of a number of considerations that we should be aware of, beyond screen size and pixel density, and provide examples of how to adapt our interfaces so they rise to meet our customers’ needs. Then he’ll turn it over to you to propose gnarly design and/or interface challenges you are struggling with. Once everyone’s challenges are collected, attendees will be given the opportunity to form small groups around each and you will spend a portion of the day working on solutions while Aaron mentors each group and pushes you to think more about accessibility, alternate interaction methods, slow networks, and other considerations.

The workshop will wrap up with brief presentations from each group followed by a an open question and answer session.

10:00 AM

Workshop

SMACSS Workshop

Jonathan Snook

The SMACSS Workshop is a full day of instruction and exercises on writing HTML and CSS using a flexible and modular approach that will improve team efficiency and minimize problems with growing projects. It takes the e-book and brings it to life with practical examples and in-depth discussion.
Get the full background info on this remarkable workshop.

10:00 AM

Workshop

Build Right: Frontend Testing Workshop (1/2 Day)

Rob Tarr & Ryan Cromwell

Frontend projects are becoming more and more complex, pushing greater rules and requirements into the browser. We expect a lot from modern web applications (many run entirely in the browser), but we’re rarely writing tests to verify that our high expectations are met. In this 1/2 day workshop we’ll give you the tools and techniques you need to build solid, tested frontend code and get your team excited about frontend testing.